More and more people I speak to are coming up with the same idea — that working one day a week for yourself gives you a better balance and loads more creativity and fulfilment. I ran a session at BarCampLondon6 on exactly this topic and it's good to hear more people starting to make similar changes to their lifestyle.
Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours?
Now for the next two days, go to talks and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on.
I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.
Ask them what theirs is, find out, because you’ll get ideas about what to learn yourself, and decide what to spend your 100 hours on. Do that for me.
Because when you contribute, when you participatein culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.
I moved from taking one day off every other week to one day off every week at the beginning of June and even that has made a big difference. My personal project has been learning to build apps for the iPhone -- starting with the Stanford iPhone Application Programming course and Aaron Hillegass's Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X.
Through evenings and snatched half hours on the train, I've got through most of the course and am starting to explore other areas, such as adding hamcrest and OCMock to the built-in OCUnit iPhone unit tests. I still plan to build and release my own apps as I get more of an understanding of what's possible.
So Matt, I've taken up your challenge before you even issued it and I look forward to others doing the same!
A brilliant evening in a beautiful venue, with a fantastic view to round off the evening. Demo nights are one of the things that makes Mobile Monday great. 14 different presentations, most of which involving hands-on demonstrations and all for real, shipping, mobile software with plenty of ideas to inspire. Sure, some of the apps weren’t exactly new (ReVoice presented way back in 2007) and not all were particularly exciting, but with so many people presenting their ideas, you’re sure to pick up some valuable nuggets.
Here’s the presentations, with the tidbits that caught my attention:
Do Tank Studios: Photo Fit iPhone app
Adam Hoyle
Take a photo of several people and mix them up like a game of consequences: a forehead from Fred, the eyes of Isabelle, the nose of Norbert, the mouth of Millie and the chin of Charles. The app lets you take photos or source them from your photo album, and line them up using basic eye and mouth alignment. Shake to mix up further, or slide to choose your mix. Simple and fun.
Adam runs a design agency and this app is a hobby app to show that they can produce iPhone apps. They’ve mostly been focussing on a fashion app, which is currently waiting for app store approval. They were going to make Photo Fit free, but there was already an app on the store that did something similar for £1.20, so they put it in the store for the next price point down. Apparently they’ve made enough to have a few beers.
Global Wirefree Community — help people find the best WiFi connectivity
partnered with Rummble in October 2008
iPhone app rummbles to twitter and Total Hotspots website (using Yahoo GeoPlanet to show surroundings and identify location name)
had a few thousand downloads from iPhone store at £3 each
also working with Microsoft
Alex worked at multimap for a while while they were being taken over by Microsoft
Total Hotspots’ database includes data direct from service providers
cf. WeFi: client connection software, that has background app that does WiFi collection as you walk down the street — picks up personal and corporate wifi (mostly secured)
Audioboo
Mark Rock
“as used by Stephen Fry…”
geolocation embedded in the meta-data of the audio
will be releasing API in about 3 weeks
business plan:
there’ll always a free version
plus version: £2.95 a month
longer recording time
queuing recording
pro version: for companies
just signed first customer: British Library
community auditing of inappropriate content
had to put this in place before the app was accepted in the iPhone store
Artilium
Dave Hodder
software for mobile network operators
previously solely in Belgium
acquired location company that uses app on SIM or device to identify accurate location using nearby cell strengths as well as current cell tower location (TILS)
in London tends to be sub 100 metres accuracy
lower resolution outside built-up areas
work with mobile operators — have their mast data
also drive around the area
improve with usage too
gets better accuracy than Google Maps for Mobile (using cell ID only)
end customer is mobile operators
will probably implement GSM ONE API when it gets more developed (i.e. has more event-based APIs)
Proxama
James Norris
payWave credit cards on an NFC phone
working with MasterCard
can change PIN over the net (combined with the secure element)
they use J2MEPolish for their JavaME apps
integrates with secure element in SIM
person to person payment is not supported with existing terminals & framework
upcoming NFC devices:
Nokia 6216 — has secure element on SIM
Samsung & LG also coming out this year (also USIM-based)
OOKL
Dan Phillips
mobile learning service
clients are schools & cultural venues
have 25 venues signed up
provide hardware and software
old Nokia phones that you can buy for £50
every object in the physical environment is labelled with a shortcode (two-letter code)
type it in on the phone to see and hear content
can write why collecting it
find out who else collected it
take photos or record audio to annotate it
all info collected is uploaded to a shared space to consider later
Synchro Arts’ ReVoice Karaoke
Jeff Bloom
As mentioned above, these guys have been around for several years now selling essentially the same thing, but the demo always gets a laugh… Jeff sings horrendously out of tune and badly timed into the ReVoice system (here an iPhone app), then uploads his “masterpiece” and has it retuned by the ReVoice server. The result is perfectly in tune and in time and still recognisably Jeff.
now have an iPhone app
record yourself
gives scores for accuracy
uploads, corrects, downloads to iPhone and shares online
aim is to send it to someone else as your ringtone
when you call, they hear your voice
At the moment, this doesn’t work with the iPhone, as you currently have to pay Apple to make a ringtone (unless you hack something…)
Masabi Rail Ticketing
Ben Whitaker (getting married this weekend— congratulations!)
Ben Smith (of the Really Mobile Project) recorded video presentation; may also be on Slideshare (old version)
Working with ATOS Origin (heathrow express & national express)
only 12% of rail tickets sold on the internet — most bought at station
masabi’s implementation has no sign up — no usernames or passwords
mostly offline…
for consumers: if it feels slick and looks slick, people will use it
Chiltern trial: compelling reason (get out of queue) got people who had never downloaded an app before to use mobile ticketing
advertise at the pain point — “while you’re queuing, try this”
Q: How have TfL responded? A: They’ve already put their investment into NFC
Big rail & bus operators like the soft roll-out of mobile barcodes rather than ITSO…
“there’s space for both”
IATA have legislated that all major airports must implement barcode tickets by May next year
In Germany, if you turn up with a mobile ticket and your battery runs out, you’re fined!
Corebridge with Wings
Simon Taylor
VPN via small app on phone
iPhone, Blackberry, WinMo & Symbian
If phone rings, CRM app launches on laptop
Similarly, click a phone number on screen and phone makes call straight away
App logs phone calls made from mobile back onto corporate server
Can send SMS messages from Lotus Notes & Outlook, but this system uses your actual mobile phone to send — so responses come to you, not the SMS gateway
Also provides enterprise-wide voice mail
spoonfed
Alex Will
21st Century version of Timeout
high quality local event content
30,000 events per month
iPhone app — Event Radar
LBS mobile Java app launching in Q3 2009
complete with maps…
looking at options for map source
have small editorial team of 5 editors to cover the whole of London
has some social features — meet up with your friends, etc.
“user generated content is great for cats on skateboards”
For the first time, I managed to convince some other Kizoom developers to come along to a weekend developer event. Dan, Matthew, Neo and Joyce joined me for Yahoo!’s Open Hack London 2009, and Neo’s friend San brought a much welcomed Lego Mindstorms set to the party.
And it was a pretty good party (though strictly a geeky one), complete with beer, music, snacks, giant Jenga and scalextric. There was even a fantastic live band (this being a geek party, the band consisted of guitar and Nintendo Gameboy…) and an iPhone orchestra:
But the most fun was the hacking. There were some absolutely stunning hacks produced over the weekend — better than both Hackday 2007 and Over The Air — and the Kizoom team had a great time playing with sticking things together for the hell of it. Mindstorms especially is great for hacks — you can run a Java VM on the programmable brick (see http://www.lejos,org) and then send it Java applets over Bluetooth. You then start attaching motors, microphones, light and distance sensors and building up the model with Lego pieces. Making silly things is fun and easy, and if you want to get serious you can even build a Rubik’s cube solver! We built a robot finger that pressed a button on a keyboard when it hears a loud noise (like playing a bongo drum!).
Aside from having a great time, both learning and building, we were very pleased to win the prize for “Most Awesome Hack”. I’d really like to include a video of our presentation, but that’s not available yet. In the meantime, here’s a few pictures of the various components:
The hacking itself was preceded by a morning of seminars on various Yahoo! and other APIs. I’ve included my notes below on the ones I attended in case anyone finds them useful.
GeoPlanet
Martin Barnes — Data Manager, Yahoo! Geo Technologies, UK (based in Shaftesbury Avenue)
I first learnt about Blueprint at Future of Mobile 2008 back in November last year, and Ricardo’s presentation was similar then. He understands the problems that are faced in mobile development, and Blueprint, like Luca Passani’s WURFL-based WALL, seems like a reasonable way to go forwards. However, it’s all down to the implementation and the edge cases and that’s a lot of hard work.
Quite a few people used Blueprint in their hacks, but didn’t actually demo on mobile phones (other than iPhones…). Dale Lane actually tried to make it work on Windows Mobile & Android G1 and had a horrible experience. When he visited his Blueprint site from his Windows Mobile browser, he actually got a message telling him to download Opera instead! That kind of ruins the point of a cross-browser system…
Yahoo!’s recent announcement that they’re killing all non-iPhone mobile native app development may point to Blueprint for mobile web getting stronger within Yahoo! But the promised native clients for BlackBerry and J2ME may now be dead in the water.
Anyway, here’s my notes from the session at Hackday:
Now gone to v1.1
Yahoo Mobile used to be text only, now graphics and styles etc.
can’t get away with things looking black and white any more…
